De Biker Boys – *(*)

A successful television maker of popular series and quizzes wants to create a highbrow travel program. The media council wants him to make a pilot episode first as his idea does not sound original and intriguing at all.

The result is a fake documentary of a less than talented team trying to make a good pilot.

The first three episodes are hilarious. The mockumentary works incredibly well. Bart De Pauw (in real life a successful television maker of popular series and quizes) has done something similar before. He made a laughing stock of all celebrity reality tv shows by faking his own celebrity reality tv show called Het Geslacht De Pauw). It was the Flemish Curb Your Enthusiasm and many viewers still didn’t get the satire after watching two seasons.

However, this time around, the show drags on and on and becomes a real mess. By episode five it’s no longer original and the script becomes too absurd.

The beginning is great though. Bart De Pauw doesn’t get the co-presenters that he wants and needs to work with two c-celebrities who couldn’t be less highbrow. Ben Segers en Jonas Van Geel play a stupid (for the first) and mean (for the latter) version of themselves. They are really good at it. An important extra is the cheap fixer who does everything wrong, starting by booking a flight to Gerona (Spain) when the show is about three men riding on a Vespa through Italy. The Vespa’s are the cheaper ‘bike’ they could get. Everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. And they all depict themselves as the biggest losers in media.

But then, by episode 4, it goes wrong. Other celebrities are invited to play a fictionalized version of themselves and it takes away the focus of the three comrades. Then by episode 6 it totally bombs. There’s an episode in Scotland and an episode in Iceland and it just doesn’t make sense.

In the beginning of the show Jonas Van Geel jokes about how he just wants to travel at the cost of the tax payer’s money (it is a show for Public Television) and that’s exactly what you feel by the end of the series. It’s no longer funny and it really feels like they just wanted an excuse to travel around in Europe for free.